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The pictograph discovered at Black Dragon Canyon, Utah, in the late 1920s, is a classic example of the Barrier Canyon style, dating probably to AD 1–1100. Creationists, however, have argued, from the incomplete preservation of the motifs, that it depicts a winged monster or pterosaur. A new study using portable X-ray fluorescence refutes this ill-founded interpretation and reveals a scene characteristic of Barrier Canyon style, featuring an anthropomorphic figure. By removing interpretational bias, the new technology finally lays to rest the Black Dragon Canyon pterosaur.

It is now 20 years since the discovery of the Grotte Chauvet with its impressive cave art, but controversy continues over the antiquity of the images. Radiocarbon assays have been used to argue that the ‘black series’ charcoal drawings date to the Aurignacian period, more than 20 000 years earlier than traditional stylistic models would suggest. This paper questions the validity of the radiometric dating and cautions against reliance solely on the date of the charcoal. Instead, the authors propose an alternative chronology for the art of Chauvet based on stylistic comparanda, palaeontological remains and stratigraphic evidence.

World prehistory is now recognised as a vast field of human experience. Indeed, it covers by far the greater part of the human story: hundreds of thousands or even millions of years. In comparison, the annals of written history do not extend back as far as six thousand years before the present day.

Fifty years ago, when Grahame Clark in Cambridge first published his World Prehistory (Clark 1961), the subject of prehistory had been studied and researched in a systematic and coherent way for just a century. Over that century, from the publication of Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species (Darwin 1859) and the public recognition in that same year of “the antiquity of man” (Lyell 1863; Lubbock 1865), the fossil record for human origins and the worldwide evidence for the origins of civilisation had been impressively documented. Yet it was only with the development of radiocarbon dating in 1949 by Willard Libby (1955), a decade earlier than the publication of Clark’s book, that some unified view of the broad sweep of prehistory became possible. For only then could a dating system be established whereby those processes and events could be set in some coherent context across the world. Only then could the development of the human species be assigned to a specific homeland – Africa – and the early outlines of the human story be written. Only then could the sedentary revolution in different parts of the world be set in the context of the climatic changes that made it possible. For then it became possible to view the key social developments that followed, including the rise of state societies, in some coherent perspective on a unified timescale. It was following the emergence of those complex societies or “civilisations”, in Sumer and in Egypt, in China, in Mesoamerica, and then more widely, that the transformative technologies of writing developed.

The Cambridge World Prehistory provides a systematic and authoritative examination of the prehistory of every region around the world from the early days of human origins in Africa two million years ago to the beginnings of written history, which in some areas started only two centuries ago. Written by a team of leading international scholars, the volumes include both traditional topics and cutting-edge approaches, such as archaeolinguistics and molecular genetics, and examine the essential questions of human development around the world. The volumes are organised geographically, exploring the evolution of hominins and their expansion from Africa, as well as the formation of states and development in each region of different technologies such as seafaring, metallurgy and food production. The Cambridge World Prehistory reveals a rich and complex history of the world. It will be an invaluable resource for any student or scholar of archaeology and related disciplines looking to research a particular topic, tradition, region or period within prehistory.